SALT LAKE CITY — A few times a year, Bryson Garbett loads up his family and heads to a national park, often one in southern Utah.
Part of the draw to a place like Zion — aside from the hiking, rappelling and backcountry stargazing — is that it’s quiet.
Garbett, president of a homebuilding company in Salt Lake City, is happy to swap the urban din for murmurings of frogs and birds or even flat, dead silence.
Almost always, though, that tranquility is broken by an airplane overhead or some other kind of man-made machinery.
“The immediate reaction is it just focuses everything on the noise,” Bryson said. “You get over it after a while but if you run into a lot of that, you start looking for somewhere else to go.”
But where?
“In many of the parks today, you can’t get away from the noise,” said Britt Mace, an associate professor of psychology at Southern Utah University, who has spent years studying the interaction between sounds and people in national parks.
Finding a place to rest your ears these days means looking beyond the country’s flagship parks.
Some of the quietest are Great Basin in Nevada, Isle Royale in the middle of Lake Superior, North Cascades in Washington state and Big Hole National Battlefield in Montana, according to the Park Service.
“When there’s no aircraft overhead, they are among the quietest places in the continental U.S.,” said Kurt Fristrup, a scientist in the Park Service’s “natural sounds” office in Fort Collins.
Established eight years ago, the department’s main job is preserving “soundscapes.” Those sounds — from hissing geysers and bugling elk to jazz music and battlefield artillery — are integral to the parks’ character and worthy of protection like any other natural resource, said Karen Trevino, the program’s director.
“The most ubiquitous source of noise in all national parks seems to be airplane noise,” Trevino said.
Several years ago, Mace conducted an experiment to gauge visitors’ reactions to the sound of helicopters at Grand Canyon National Park, where there are more than 86,000 commercial air tours a year. In the experiment, it didn’t matter whether the helicopters were for tours, medical rescues or in aid of endangered species, Mace said.
“They just didn’t like the presence of the noise.”
